Free 21st Century Science Fiction by D B Hartwell

“Fuckin’ toast’s on fire!”
    Smoke began to trickle out from under the hot plate lid. Maddie yanked the wire toasting rack out from under it and dunked it into the sink, waited for waterlogged black crumbs to float to the surface before taking it out, opening it, and loading it with fresh bread.
    “Bugger,” she remarked.
    “You feel trapped?” Joe asked.
Again?
He wondered.
    Maddie grunted evasively. “Not your fault, love. Just life.”
    “Life.” Joe sniffed, then sneezed violently as the acrid smoke tickled his nose. “Life!”
    “Horizon’s closing in,” she said quietly. “Need a change of horizons.”
    “Ayup, well, rust never sleeps, right? Got to clean out the winter stables, haven’t I?” said Joe. He grinned uncertainly at her as he turned away. “Got a shipment of fertilizer coming in.”
    • • • •
    In between milking the herd, feeding the sheep, mucking out the winter stables, and surreptitiously EMPing every police ’bot on the farm into the silicon afterlife, it took Joe a couple of days to get round to running up his toy on the household fabricator. It clicked and whirred to itself like a demented knitting machine as it ran up the gadgets he’d ordered—a modified crop sprayer with double-walled tanks and hoses, an air rifle with a dart loaded with a potent cocktail of tubocurarine and etorphine, and a breathing mask with its own oxygen supply.
    Maddie made herself scarce, puttering around the control room but mostly disappearing during the daytime, coming back to the house after dark to crawl, exhausted, into bed. She didn’t seem to be having nightmares, which was a good sign. Joe kept his questions to himself.
    It took another five days for the smallholding’s power field to concentrate enough juice to begin fueling up his murder weapons. During this time, Joe took the house off-Net in the most deniable and surreptitiously plausible way, a bastard coincidence of squirrel-induced cable fade and a badly shielded alternator on the backhoe to do for the wireless chitchat. He’d half expected Maddie to complain, but she didn’t say anything—just spent more time away in Outer Cheswick or Lower Gruntlingthorpe or wherever she’d taken to holing up.
    Finally, the tank was filled. So Joe girded his loins, donned his armor, picked up his weapons, and went to do battle with the dragon by the pond.
    The woods around the pond had once been enclosed by a wooden fence, a charming copse of old-growth deciduous trees, elm and oak and beech growing uphill, smaller shrubs nestling at their ankles in a green skirt that reached all the way to the almost-stagnant waters. A little stream fed into it during rainy months, under the feet of a weeping willow; children had played here, pretending to explore the wilderness beneath the benevolent gaze of their parental control cameras.
    That had been long ago. Today the woods really
were
wild. No kids, no picnicking city folks, no cars. Badgers and wild coypu and small, frightened wallabies roamed the parching English countryside during the summer dry season. The water drew back to expose an apron of cracked mud, planted with abandoned tin cans and a supermarket trolley of Precambrian vintage, its GPS tracker long since shorted out. The bones of the technological epoch, poking from the treacherous surface of a fossil mud bath. And around the edge of the mimsy puddle, the stage trees grew.
    Joe switched on his jammer and walked in among the spear-shaped conifers. Their needles were matte black and fuzzy at the edges, fractally divided, the better to soak up all the available light: a network of taproots and fuzzy black grasslike stuff covered the ground densely around them. Joe’s breath wheezed noisily in his ears, and he sweated into the airtight suit as he worked, pumping a stream of colorless smoking liquid at the roots of each ballistic trunk. The liquid fizzed and evaporated on contact: it seemed to bleach the wood where it touched. Joe